Is There Still Untouchability in India

Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics Collective Violence and the Making of Civil Society: India in European Perspective by Subrata K. Mitra Working Paper No. 19 October 2003 South Asia Institute Department of Political Science University of Heidelberg Collective Violence and the Making of Civil Society India in European Perspective SUBRATA KUMAR MITRA South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg1 Are riots, risings and revolutions acts of collective madness, or are they political events, offering a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a system, laying bare the legitimacy deficit that moves rational men and women to kill and die? Fun, profit, peer pressure, or moral outrage - which of these is the main motive of rioters? Is collective violence a form of violent participation, which, in the final analysis, acts as the midwife of civil society? The full investigation of these general and comparative questions is beyond the scope of my paper. Still, they provide the main inspiration for the empirical analysis undertaken here. The paper develops a model of conflict resolution based on countervailing powers, the symbolic recognition of memories of violence, and new institutional arrangements. This framework is used for the analysis of three identity-related issues from post- independence Indian politics. Two of these have been successfully resolved where as attempts to resolve the third have been less successful. Drawing on the contributions of Natalie Davis (1973), Ian Gilmour (1992) Pierre Nora (1989) and Simon Schama (1989) to collective violence and the foundation of civil societies in the west, the paper characterises the outbreak of pogroms, riots, and other forms of collective violence as political phenomena that indicate deeply seated conflicts 1 This paper was presented at the International Seminar on Political and Social Transition in India and Europe, at Leipzig University, 29-30 September, 2003. The material presented in this paper form part of my project on 'Governance in India', funded by the DFG (German Research Council). Access to the opinion data generated by the National Election Study, (CSDS, Delhi, 1996) is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to thank Alexander Fischer, Kenneth McPherson, Malte Pehl and Lavanya Regunathan-Fischer for their comments on an earlier draft. Subrata Mitra is Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg (eMail: [email protected]), and a Visiting Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. HEIDELBERG PAPERS IN SOUTH ASIAN AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS http://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/abt/SAPOL/HPSACP.htm Working Paper No. 19, October 2003 SUBRATA K. MITRA 2 over the core values of a society. How these conflicts are solved has important implications for the establishment of an institutional framework that promotes a society based on interpersonal trust, respect of individuals and groups, orderly rule and the rights of expression and association. Scholarly interest in the role of violence in accelerating social change has gone out of fashion since the general diffusion of utopian ideas like democracy, social capital and world governance in western liberal democracies. The insistence of donors in the North and their clients in the South on these canons2 as the only modes of correct political behaviour has consequence for transitional societies of the South that are far from benign.3 Newcomers to the high table of states and nations, these candidate-members must earn this privilege by subjecting their political conduct to the rules laid down by the members of the club who conveniently overlook the tortuous path they themselves have had to take to reach their current institutional forms. By the same logic, scholarly inquiries into riots, pogroms, insurgencies and other forms of political unrest in non-western societies must conform to a prescribed code of conduct by first condemning their subject before engaging in an analysis of the social process that has led to its outbreak. The liberal bias, often accompanied by the failure to situate the collective violence in its context, results in the blatant characterisation of these political acts as bizarre, perverse or simply as the proof of the cultural incapacity of the societies where they occur to sustain civilised norms in public life. Such a failure of imagination and empathy would, in an academic debate, be risible if its costs in terms of avoidable suffering were not so immense. It is not my intention in this paper to engage in cultural one-upmanship, nor to exonerate human suffering in terms of cultural idiosyncrasy. Instead, the paper focuses on the origin and demise of collective violence, meted out by one group against another for the sheer reason of their difference. I maintain in this paper that the best chance for the creation of a civil society out of the wreckage of collective violence consists in grounding one's analysis of its origin firmly in the social and historical context, and keeping the scholarly inquiry as close to the actors as possible. Though India is the main empirical context for this paper, the analysis of Indian data undertaken here draws on European examples of collective violence partly to establish parameters for historical comparison, but also to generate analytical space for institutional arrangements that have led to the creation of civil societies in the West where much blood has been shed on account of religious differences. 2 It must be added here that in the light of the America-Europe rift on Iraq, the western establishment - donor agencies, media, governments and public opinion - does not speak in one voice any more. The plurality of the 'North', howsoever weak on issues truly vital to its core interests, still holds an important room to manoeuvre for strategists of the 'South'. 3 This, faute de mieux, is possibly the most widely accepted expression for poor, non- Western, non-industrial countries, which, at the heyday of post war modernisation euphoria used to be referred to with optimistic euphemism as changing societies or developing countries. SUBRATA K. MITRA 3 THE INDIAN CONTEXT The intriguing nature of the Indian example arises from the fact that while her politics provide plenty of examples of collective violence, the structure and process of her political system demonstrates an endogenous institutional capacity to cope with it. When compared to the majority of changing societies, India comes across as a case of successful transition from colonial rule and a stagnant economy, to a robust democracy, orderly rule and at least for the last decade, vigorous economic growth. This record has come under a shadow in recent times on account of sharp outbreaks of violent religious riots and their bitter aftermath. The decade that spans the destruction of the Babri Mosque of Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu militants, and the Godhra massacre of Hindu pilgrims in 2002 attributed to a Muslim mob4 has brought into sharp focus the "mounting anxiety about the future of India".5 The inclusive character of the political system has appeared to be on the wane as public authorities are accused of being complicit in religious pogroms.6 Communal mobilisation, deftly blending historical memories and panoply of material grievances, is seen by many analysts as ascendant7. Policemen with long experience of violent mobs see the surge in communal antagonism the great scourge of the modern state and governance in India. (Rajgopal, 1987) The 'evil of communalism' is constantly present in the media.8 India, it is asserted in a series of ethnographic reports on the violent world of cultural nationalism, is fragmenting on communal lines.9 4 Uday Mahurka "Terror's Mask", India Today, February 24, 2003, p. 40. Televised images of the destruction of the Babri mosque and the post-Godhra communal riots have accelerated the incorporation of religious fury into everyday politics in India and reporting about it abroad. 5 Varshney, (1993), p. 227. 6 "How has the Gujarat massacre affected minority women: The survivors speak", in http://www.imannet.com/articles/survivorspeak.html. Indian Muslim Alert Network - a division of Indian Muslim Council (IMC-USA) www.ImanNet.com. See on April 16, 2002 7 The concept 'communal' is used in a specifically Indian sense which differs from its lexical meaning of "someone who is altruistic and civic-minded". The media and agents of the state use it to identify people whose "exclusive attachment to his or her community is combined with an active hostility against other communities which share its geographical and political space." (Kakar 1995, p. 17) The antonym of communalists in Indian usage are 'secularists', who do not see any legitimate room for religious symbols in the public sphere or religious influences on social, economic and political rules. According to Kakar, the intractable character of communal riots derives from the fact that they become "imbued with religious ultimacy". Kakar (1995, p. 51) Wilkinson, (2000), presents ethnic mobilisation as the main cause of violence in India on the basis of content analysis of newspaper reporting. 8Described as danga in the vernacular languages of India north of the Vindhyas, sampradayikata in the chaster Hindi, communalism in the English language press and police reports, conflict between communities is a constant presence in public as well as private conversations. 9 For ethnographic forays into the violent world of cultural nationalism see Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 1997), Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University SUBRATA K. MITRA 4 In contrast to the chorus of negative prognosis of India's capacity to sustain democracy and governance, this paper argues that India's institutional arrangement remains basically stable and coherent, particularly with regard to sectarian violence based on language, religion, region, caste or class.

Load more